Still Life in Harlem (23 page)

“After a while,” she said, “it got so that I was afraid to go home after work. People would be sitting out on the stoops and hanging out at the corners and they would say mean things to me and about me as I passed. Even if they said nothing, there was something in their eyes that spoke of threats. I didn't belong there anymore. Harlem wasn't mine anymore. I was an outsider. So I moved away. I went downtown.”

Who could blame her for being afraid, for feeling excluded, for feeling that Harlem belonged to others and that she now ought to stay away and cannot go there?

If the answer is No one, then how can you blame the yellow taxi drivers who, except on rarest occasions, will refuse to come this far uptown? You hardly ever see yellow cabs on the streets of Harlem. They just don't come up this far. As a consequence many black fares are left standing on downtown avenues. Many cabbies will assume that black fares heading uptown are going home to Harlem and too often will refuse to pick them up.

The drivers themselves will tell you, Yes, that it's the law, that they have to drive you there—to Harlem or anywhere else in the city—if that's where you want to go. In practice it is quite another thing.

A driver downtown said to me, “Sorry, buddy. I just don't go up there.”

He knew, of course, about the taxi commission's rule.

“Look, bud,” he said. “I know all that stuff. It's like the law, or something. And I know what you probably are thinking. But I don't drive into Brooklyn either, and it's not just some racial thing. It's just too hard to get a fare coming back into the city, so I got to come back empty. And if I'm driving around empty, I'm not making any money.”

“And that's the only reason?” I asked. “That's all there is?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's all it is.” But I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, and they were watching me watching him. “It's just too far away,” he said slowly—very slowly—then added, “And it's too fucking dangerous.”

And who can blame him? Forty-one taxi drivers had been killed in New York City that year, most of them in the Bronx and in Harlem. Who can blame cab drivers for not wanting to go there?

Who can blame Camellia Scott or Pig Foot Mary or Joseph Carver, who felt unsafe, who left Harlem, who moved to Brooklyn? Who can blame the white folks who don't come up, who don't live here, who don't want to be here? Who can blame Camellia Scott and her young friends for their gloating response: Go away from here, we don't want you here, this is ours?

Who can blame them all for falling into a trap that has been camouflaged for so long and that they cannot see?

Go away from here, this is ours, we don't want you here.

(And the counterpointing voices:
Yes indeed, this is theirs.
)

How the voices sting in my ears, the times I've seen these words in action, the times I've said them myself!

And this is what those words, those actions, the sentiment, have brought us to. Here is where we stand.

A white woman I knew walked along 125th one evening in the direction of the subway station at St. Nicholas Avenue. It was raining. It was getting dark. Three men blocked her path, she told me, and made her change direction. She crossed the street, they crossed with her, in front of her, and when they got close enough to her, they muttered at her: “Uh-uh, bitch. Not here.” And that was all. They wanted nothing else but to scare her and let her know where she did not belong.

A white man I knew worked for a time at the Paul Robeson Health Center on 125th Street. He left work one afternoon, walked to the bus stop on his way home. He was attacked on the street and beaten. The men who jumped him did not take his wallet. They did not demand money. They only wanted him to know where he was and whose neighborhood it was.

Whose neighborhood is this, whose world?

I remember the walk I took when I first moved to Harlem. It was a rainy day, but warm, and I wore no coat. I had found my apartment and moved in and now was feeling out the blocks that would be my new neighborhood. I felt truly at home in Harlem, happy to be black, happy to be in a black place. I turned the corner from Convent Avenue onto 145th Street, and in the doorway of the church that is there, two Asian men huddled beneath the portico to keep out of the rain. They could have been Korean shopkeepers who lived in the neighborhood, could have been Japanese tourists. I saw them from across the street and all I could think was,
What are you doing here? Go home, get away from here. Get on the bus and go. This does not belong to you, this is ours.

And there it was. I had fallen into the trap that divides this country into at least two worlds, the one world black and the other world white, with the barriers that separate them rising like mountains, the one world so willingly trying to isolate itself from the other.

Hundred Twenty-fifth Street, now and for a long time the main street of Harlem, was once the shopping center for the white folks, mostly Irish, who lived on the West Side above 116th. It was a time of separation. Blacks were not welcome to shop on 125th Street, even after Harlem had become the black quarter of New York City. Nor, for the most part, were they even allowed to work in those stores, not even to serve the white people who shopped there. The separation of these two worlds, black and white, was nearly total, and almost entirely at the discretion and whim of the world that is white.

Now again we find ourselves in an era of separation. Except for the tourists on Sunday, and here and there the odd white soul brave enough to venture up to Harlem, the one world and the other world are not a part of the same world. At any rate, they do not intersect anywhere near Harlem, for Harlem sits on the edge of a shelf far away from the centers of power and privilege, and to be here is to be acutely aware of this isolation, I would think. To be here is to be waiting always to be swept off the table altogether, onto the floor and into some corner where we go seemingly choiceless but at the same time all too freely.

On the corner of 125th and Amsterdam sits a huge housing project named for General Grant. It is tall and massive and made of yellowish brick. It takes up two of the four corners and spills down Amsterdam for another block or so.

On many occasions I have stood on that corner and tried to count the people who live there—not one by one, of course, but counted the windows, counted the numbers of floors, guessed at how many apartments there might be on each floor, and multiplied by a reasonable four people per apartment. By my crude calculations there must be over thirty thousand people living in this housing project—if you can call it living. Certainly those who dwell here consider it living. It is home to them. It has become what they know. But there are more people living on this corner than in the whole of the suburban hometown where I grew up.

Lashae Anthony lives in a housing project just like this one, but on the east side of Harlem. It is the only world he knows, the only home he has. He says he likes living there because his housing project is better than the other projects: cleaner, safer, nicer.

In what way nicer? “Just nicer,” he would say, in that shy way he had then. He was only thirteen years old at the time.

It was, of course, and certainly to the untrained eye, no better, no worse, than any of the other housing projects, but it was where he lived. It was his. It was home. And he had only one project against another upon which to base his comparison.

It is amazing the things we can get used to when we force ourselves. It is perhaps still more amazing what we get used to if we allow ourselves even a moment's complacency. And quite simply it astounds me the things we will settle for and take comfort in once we convince ourselves, This is ours! No matter what the
this
is.

In the blood rush of recent memory, in the four seconds before I walked over and stood face to face with Eliot, the mind races and I cannot disregard the conflict that stirs within.

On the one hand I can understand the impulse for separation.

On the other hand I see it as little more than surrender, little more than the kind of blind acquiescence that Eliot once spoke to me about, a kind of self-inflicted isolation that plays right into the applauding hands of those who seek the separation and who profit somehow from it.

It is to me surrender, but of course I see the world from a particularly advantaged vantage point and think, rightly or wrongly, that there is nothing I cannot have, do, or be.

Similarly, there is in San Diego a woman of European complexion who struggles with this same question. She is in law school there, and she joined the Black Law Students' Association. She was told she was not welcome there, that she did not belong.

Likewise, a university professor who is white is repeatedly given a similar message. She teaches black studies, she teaches the writings of black authors. It was not easy for her to find a job. Oftentimes students and faculty have resented her presence. The same sentiment is at work here: This area is not hers; she does not belong here.

If this is true, if the one can't be part of a black studies program and the other can't join a group of black students, how in theory can a complaint be raised against black exclusion from the country club, from the halls of power, from the chambers of the boards of directors, from inclusion in general? If we crave this separation and are happy with it, where then the grievance, and why then the desire to share in what some will say is not ours?

Yes yes yes! I can already hear the argument that there is a difference. And perhaps there is, the difference having to do with a history of exclusion, a history of being oppressed, a history of all the time knocking on doors and never being allowed to enter, and
now finally we have something that is ours, and we want to keep it for ourselves and for us alone:
a place where we can let our hair down and for once not have to deal with white people, a place where we can go and be on our own, prosper on our own, celebrate ourselves, define ourselves, and meet our own needs.

Perhaps, then, there is a value in the ghetto—not only in this ghetto, but in ghettos of every kind: places where people of like mind and similar experience, people who look alike and think alike and share the same ideals and goals, the same ideas, the same dreams, desires, and ambitions and the same culture, can come together and live in peace away from all the others—whoever the others might be.

Perhaps there is value indeed in living in a ghetto, but the arguments we use to ghettoize ourselves are the same arguments the others use when they wish to exclude us and keep the treasures for themselves. Just as Eliot does, I wonder who ultimately comes out the big winner.

All I have to do is remember the walks I have taken. There is life on these streets, there are children playing, people laughing, lovers courting, and ball players shooting hoops on the playgrounds. There is music that streams from the apartments on the route from my apartment to Riverbank Park where I sometimes go to hit tennis balls, and music that booms from cars parked on 135th, music pouring from the shops on East 116th. But amid the life and the music, there are people standing around with nothing to do and nowhere to go, too much trash on every street, houses boarded up, buildings burned out, and housing project after housing project, named for someone named Grant, named Carver, named Robinson, named Lincoln, named for famous blacks or for people in history who were sympathetic to the black cause.

I looked at Eliot, I looked up and down the nearby streets, I waited to see what the next step might be.

I recalled in those few moments of stillness my first days in Harlem, those heady, electrifying days when I could feel Harlem's history upon my shoulders and the burden seemed such an easy one to bear, when I was more than happy to be trapped here in the ghetto, when I was in fact thrilled to be here, here in what once was the center of the black universe, here where in former times had come the many others who dreamed of creating the kind of haven that would serve as shelter where black folk could celebrate themselves, define themselves, cultivate themselves before they sprang forth into the wider world.

And so they came to Harlem—many in body, many in spirit only—from out of the South and from all corners of the black world: the businessmen, the educated, the politicians, and the skilled workers—to live in this ghetto that they might not have to live in some other ghetto.

And they came sowing the seeds of disaster, for it can be said that they who migrated north from the Deep South abandoned in many ways those blacks who remained there and left them bereft of shining example, left them too, it can be argued, bereft of leadership.

They came as well the slackers and the vagabonds and the ruffians, the unskilled, the under- and the uneducated who were left behind with the simply unlucky and once again found themselves bereft of shining example, bereft of leadership when they flew away, those who could fly from here. Pig Foot Mary. My father. I, myself.

Those who remain can claim pride of ownership, yes, can settle in and be content with what they have and can keep others out. But what they fight so hard to maintain as their own seem so often and in so many ways leftovers at best, and more often the sweepings of the street piled high off to the side or in some corner, discarded crumbs and refuse that really aren't
ours
but rather the giveaways, the throwaways, what has been picked over and what remains—not ours because we don't lay claim to it until it is already given to us.

“That,”
Eliot said, “is what I mean when I say the black man is finished.”

I had turned around, and I had thought long enough now about which was the right move to make. I knew, of course, which would have been the easy thing to do, but easier is not always right, not always better.

Many were the nights during my time in Harlem that I came up from the subway at St. Nicholas and 125th and walked the rest of the way home. Many were the nights that I walked to Sylvia's to get a bite to eat, or went over to La Famille on Fifth Avenue to listen to music, or sometimes even I was just out for a stroll. When the weather was warm enough—and it didn't really have to be so very warm, just not so frigid—somewhere along the way of my walking I always came across men bunched together in groups on one street corner or another.